Corbynism: A political postmortem
An end to the materialist basis of politics?
In the 1900s James Connolly sarcastically mocked the fearful calls for restraint of more timid social-democrats in his song “Our demands most moderate are, we only want the earth”.Going one step further, the situationist graffiti in Paris, May ’68 read “Be realistic, demand the impossible”. Unfortunately for Labour party canvassers this December, it turned out that a lot of potential labour voters seemed to view the party’s manifesto as neither possible or credible. This has caused a bit of a crisis amongst those sections of the left that throughout the Blair and Clinton years of post-Keynesian neoliberal centre-leftism held to the belief that if only the restraints of the evil centrists could be overcome and more maximalist demands put before the working class electorate, the long-term decline of the left and the labour movement could be reversed.
After the brief fillip of the 2017 election, where the unexpectedly good results for the most economically left-wing manifesto since 1983 seemed to be showing results, the 12th December 2019 has come crashing down to leave the true believers disorientated, bereaved and in search of a scapegoat to blame for a result they are struggling to understand. Some have retreated into the cynical misanthropy of “The people have spoken, the bastards!” or Brecht’s acerbic line from Die Lösung on the party dissolving the people and electing another. Others, in their desperation to clutch at straws, have swallowed whole the pre-prepared Milne-Murray-McCluskey narrative that it was the “Remainiac wreckers wot ruined it for everyone”, flying in the face of the evidence of their own experiences on the doorsteps or the attitude polling drill-downs.
The dubious consolations of ready-made factional revisionisms aside, the basic question of why did the majority of the working class electorate not seem ready to vote for the manifesto that appears to be in their best material interests, remains to be answered. One bewildered commentator expressed it thus:
“If the UK exit poll is correct it’s pretty appalling. I don’t know, does this and the general rise of far Right politics globally point to an end to the materialist basis of politics?”
The answer to this question is of the greatest significance to not just the electoralist left but in fact to all of the left who believe in organising around class interests including abstemptionist or electoralist-sceptical fractions such as syndicalists, anarchists, ultra-left communists, etc. Without a materialist basis for politics, then the only grounds for mobilizing or organising are the politics of identity or social justice ethics — in a word, idealism at best, tribalism at worst.
Counterpower
As any workplace or community organiser knows, the degree of improvement in our conditions that employees or tenants believe is possible is not a fixed value. Our “horizon of the possible” is strongly shaped by recent experiences in either winning or losing contests with the class enemy. Hence the mantra in the organising milieu that small wins make bigger wins possible.
That same principle, that belief in what gains are “possible” is determined by morale and confidence rather than “objective interests” also applies to the working class sections of entire electorates.
Then question then becomes, when there is such a clear mismatch between the ambition of a left reformist program big enough to make a real difference, and the compressed expectations of an electorate that has suffered decades of deindustrialisation, neoliberal onslaught and austerity — what is to be done?
There are really only two possible answers to this question. Either, with the help of polling organisations, focus groups, etc, find the maximum limit of what people are currently able to believe is achievable and then shrink the programme down to that level — tail-ism, in other words. Or find a way to expand people’s horizons of possibility on a large enough scale to make a difference.
To the extent that Corbynism has or had definable political positions (a question we’ll come back to later) it is pretty clear that the first option is part and parcel of the kind of centrism that the project defined itself against. So the second question of how to grow working class confidence and senses of legitimate entitlement and possibility, becomes the key one. So long as the existence of a mismatch between programme and expectations is not denied from the outset as a “non-problem” as certain elements are already doing.
So how do we build people’s confidence? Through the power of ideas alone, or through the experience of exercising power?
In a recent article Jonathan Freedland (a Corbynist bête noire — a pretty long list, these days) quoted one of his old teachers saying “People don’t trust ideas, people trust people who trust ideas”. (To which might add “…or not”). The point is that it appears that only a small fraction of society appears put their confidence in ideas alone. Unfortunately a disproportionate number of that minority are drawn into movements for social change and then end up confused as to why they can’t convert the rest of society to their cause by ideas alone. Which is why all successful historical movements have solid traditions, ideology and theory around organising and building power through participatory action. But when the social basis for those historical movements starts to fragment and disappear through capitalism’s technological and geographical organisation of social production (a process the Italian operaisti called political decomposition) the influence of the “sola fide” cohort rises again.
Counterpower is the idea that for the majority of the working class, ideas alone are not enough. Sending out waves of acolytes to knock on doors to deliver the good news of the new socialist gospel will not, of itself, produce the desired political recomposition of class confidence needed in these times.
This too is materialism. Materialism is not the reduction of class interests to a laundry list of spending items, like some kind of Christmas letter to socialist Santa. “Everything for everybody” is an ultra-left slogan, not a reformist strategy. Counterpower is understanding that the materialist basis for belief in collective power is to actually experience some of that power. The old saying “seeing is believing” is wrong. To be reduced to the role of passive observer of the spectacle of dominant class power is to be disempowered. In that sense, seeing is believing in the power of the class enemy, which is to disbelieve in our own alternative power. Only experiencing is empowering. The idea that we can substitute the force of ideas, fine words, visions and “messaging” for experience is idealism, the disease of the intelligentsia and lumpen-intelligentsia minorities that dominate the left in its current weakened, sectarian condition.
There is no room for counterpower in the dominant bourgeois liberal model of democracy. In that model there is only an unstructured (read classless) horizontal mass of the citizenry, whose movement of thought and feeling is referred to under the nebulous term of “public opinion”. Periodic elections then transform that protean political potential into elected representatives who then effect a “market correction” in governance depending on the ebb and flow of political sentiment in the citizenry. There are only two terms in this polarity — public opinion and power.
The left model of politics breaks with the dominant liberal model decisively on the question of class. However, aside from the anarchists and certain heterodox currents, the break with the liberal model on the crucial question of the power/counterpower dialectic is, at best, ambiguous. In pre-WW1 German Social Democracy, the centre of gravity of Second International socialism, the horizontal mass of the working class was substituted for the liberal classless citizenry, and “class consciousness” for public opinion. But ideological re-labelling aside, the structure of the liberal model of consciousness vs power was retained, albeit channelled through the medium of the SPD. A party that, ironically, relied on a vast institutional network of counterpower organisations in the sphere of reproduction, from unions, to sports clubs, educational groups, health clinics, youth groups, etc. A social counterpower structure that the bourgeoisie — in its pre-fordist epoch — was unable (and to a degree, unwilling) to break down. Only the Nazis were ultimately able to destroy this power by direct force and occupying every social niche by replacing each SPD organisation with one of their own (sports groups, women’s groups, youth groups, etc). In Russia, similarly, when the 1905 revolutionary upsurge threw up their own organs of counterpower — the soviets — both Menshevik and Bolshevik wings of the RSDRP initially ignored them and it was left to the anarchists, Bundists and Populists to engage them (and eventually Trotsky, who was at that time not part of either of the two RSDRP factions). Even in 1917, when Lenin returned to St Petersburg and issued his call for all power to the Soviets, the rest of the Bolshevik leadership initially assumed that he’d either gone mad or converted to Bakuninism.
Of course the impact of the Russian revolution on modern leftism meant that the role of the soviets had to be ideologically incorporated in some fashion. However this has been done not by theorising counterpower, but by substituting the concept of “dual power” which is explicitly bracketed as a “state of exception” in the brief period of the revolutionary crisis — in other words, a conceptualisation that implicitly denies the counterpower/power dialectic as part of the class dynamic and, by default, falls back into the classical social democrat relabelled version of the liberal bipolar model.
It’s important not to get too hung up on labels, call it counterpower, call it political class composition, constituent power, call it whatever you like (and preferably something more accessible than those latter terms), what matters is the understanding behind the words. Community and workplace organisers know the readiness and confidence of their members in taking on a fight for demands is a variable that depends on the experience of recent fights and wins (or losses). And if that applies at the level of individual neighbourhoods and workplaces, it also applies at the level of whole electorates. That’s not the end of the materialist basis of politics, it’s the very beginning of it.
It’s not like the basic message about the need to get back to grass-roots organising at community and workplace level in order to build a sufficient level of counterpower to make new horizons of hope possible, is a particularly new or original message. In fact it’s been repeated practically ad nauseam. Unfortunately far too many of the left prefer to look for the next shortcut to get us to where we want to be without all that unpleasant, tedious, damned, you know… work stuff. Post-structuralist philosopher of gender Judith Butler came up with the idea of “performativity” — the idea that gendered behaviours are not the representations of some underlying essence of gender, but are the thing itself. Nowadays, in order to hide from themselves that their strategy (such as it is) is a shortcut, the left have put their faith into electoralism as being “performative” in the Butlerian sense. That is, that left electoral parties are not the representation of working class counterpower, but can summon into being the very thing (class power) of which it desires to be a representative. Now that really is idealism and the end of the materialist basis of politics. Sorry folks, you can’t get something for nothing. No counterpower, no win. Simple as.
Ideology
We’ve looked at the need for counterpower to empower working class people enough to expand the horizon of their expectations of what is winnable enough to make an ambitious reformist agenda a vote-winner rather than a vote-loser. But closer inspection of the manifesto reveals a second fundamental problem, beyond mere scope of ambition.
The structure of the manifesto reveals a lack of analysis (how on earth can housing be relegated to the back, in the social justice section, rather than the economy section?), leading to a lack of strategy and failure to provide a narrative showing in which direction the line of advance away from neoliberal austerity lies.
There are two issues underlying the symptomatic “tyranny of structurelessness” of the many, many pledges in the manifesto (not to mention the plethora of late additions thrown willy-nilly at the media in desperation at the unbudging polls). The first appears merely technical, at first sight. If your ambition is to undo the damage of 4 decades of neoliberalism in one single wish list, there does have to be some recognition that not everything can be done at once in the first hundred days, so items need to be ranked in some kind of priority — in what order should privatisation be rolled back, for e.g — does water come before rail, or vice versa?
Football referees don’t get paid vast fortunes, even at the top level, and below that, they mostly don’t paid at all. But even if they are clearly doing it for the love of the game and the enjoyment of the fans, it doesn’t mean if they lose control of a game the fans won’t chant “You don’t know what you’re doing!” at them. And if the 2019 manifesto was a referee, that’s exactly the verdict it got on 12 December.
But beyond the “mere pragmatism” argument — which, let’s face it, appears indistinguishable from the attacks currently being made by the anti-Corbynist right wing of the party at the moment — lies a deeper problem, one that’s almost the polar opposite of what the right are saying. Namely that in reality there is no Corbynist ideology for anyone to give up.
Lack of any formal explicitly articulated ideology is hardly unusual in the sphere of politics — the political centre and what a lot of the left disparagingly label as “liberalism” is almost defined by it. Similarly, the dividing line between right-populists and the far right is that the former, while rejecting the status quo of dominant centrist politics, have yet to find any ideology of their own, while the latter (no matter how hard they try to disguise it) very much have.
Given the history of endless sectarian warfare over matters of tactics and doctrine between the various factions of the ideologically-committed far left, it’s understandable that groups like Momentum and other pro-Corbyn LP tendencies, tried to put a lid on the ideological warfare and mobilise from behind a handful of lowest common denominator bullet points. But there’s a significant cost to not having a common ideology to unite around, a cost that gets cumulatively worse as time goes on. Being unable to prioritise manifesto programme promises for fear of causing an internal row, is only for starters.
Will Hutton (another from the afore-mentioned list) recently wrote a spitefully provocative piece in the Guardian suggesting that the term “neoliberal” has become just another “unthinking leftist insult”. Apart from “well he would say that, wouldn’t he?” and “it’s the Guardian, duh!” responses, there is a reason why he thinks he can get away with saying that. Which is that if you have no ideology, you actually don’t have any working definition of neoliberalism (“That thing that David Harvey wrote a book about” doesn’t count — especially on the doorstep) or anything else that matters.
Political commentators often write about the difficulty political parties or tendencies have with moving from a position of opposition to actually taking power. Without any teachable or communicable ideology, Corbynism is hamstrung to just being against the current centre-left that Blair formed by abandoning Keynesianism (the economic ideology of the previous centre-left) in favour of neoliberal “capitalist realism”, without ever being able to put forward a clear statement of what the left reformist alternative is.
And therein lies the rub… Of course the militants of the ideologically-committed far left would rather stick pins in their eyes than accept that they are left-reformists. It’s central to their self-image and core identity that they are “revolutionaries”. But in a membership of over half a million people, the large majority of whom are hostile to Blarite neoliberal warmongering centrism and supportive to Corbyn, the far left menagerie of stalinists, trots, etc, are a small minority of Corbynism as a mass phenomenon. The problem is that a large number of these people are still a bit squeamish about owning left reformism as an identity, never mind drawing up a workable ideology and programme around it. Politics is like marriage, to make it work long-term you have to genuinely commit to it.
The only left reformist way to overcome neoliberal centrism is to move the political centre, or at least the left of it, to a new location. In other words, to beat the existing centre-left you have become the new centre left, on a terrain of your own choosing — and for that you need an ideology, from which strategy, tactics, priorities, policies, narratives and messaging can be thrashed out and agreed. But without that starting point there is no way out of the impotence of eternal opposition.
Let’s be honest, as a slogan “A new centre left is possible” is about as sexy as a greasy washing up bowl full of dirty dishes and cold sick. But once you’ve eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however unpalatable, is what you have to deal with.
It may seem inconsistent to say that the political centre basks in the luxury of being “non-ideological” while at the same time saying that to move the centre to new ground is impossible without and ideological roadmap of why and how. But the inconsistency is only apparent. Marx recognised this when he drew a dividing line between classical political economy — whose champions were trying to conquer the existing establishment from a position starting outside of power — and the vulgar economists who followed them, once liberal political economy had become the dominant ideology of the age. In order to conquer the political centre-ground of their day, the classical political economists had to work hard to craft a coherent, functional ideology capable of being weaponised against the incumbents of the day. Whereas the vulgar economists simply produced apologetics to retrospectively justify the actions the ruling class had already decided to take. An exercise in which any old waffle good enough to be printed by the Guardian (of either era) would do.
It’s telling that when aiming to change public thinking the right set up think tanks and the left set up media collectives. Novara media and the Canary are not going to plug the ideological vacuum at the centre of Corbynism. Momentum seems happy to restrict itself to mobilising cannon fodder for the doorstep canvassing for votes for manifestos they have no input into. The project to craft a new ideological centre appears not merely non-existent but not even understood. Frankly the potential is not promising.
But before drawing this reflection on the contradictions of an anti-ideological anti-centrist left to a close, one further potentially crippling problem needs to be referred to. Namely, what does factionalism look like in an ideological vacuum? Well, pretty ugly, as it turns out.
In the absence of any possibility of the debate between the left and right in the Labour Party being carried out on ideological grounds, the only alternative is the classical populist conversion of all conflicts to the cosmic conflict between good (us) and evil (them). That then begs the question of how the crucial demarcation line between us and them is to be drawn without ideological reference points? The answer appears to be the adoption of certain fetishised political landmarks as signs of belonging or not belonging to the tribe of the just. Political issues are reduced to tribal totems and shibboleths that mark out the territorial divide between friend and foe. Having the “correct” political line on events in far-away countries to which one has never been and knows nothing about, becomes the equivalent of gang signs displayed by the Bloods and Crips to show their affiliations. The whole process accompanied by performative virtue signalling on social media by piling into whatever latest row your gang is involved in at the moment, based on the worst possible interpretations of anyone else’s statements, leavened with ad hominem attacks of the worst kind and outright falsehoods. The resulting shitshow is absolute poison to anyone who might have naively engaged with the party in the hopes of making the world or their bit of it, somewhat less shit.
But this is the price of “politics-free politics” as Steve Bell once called it. If you can’t engage with your political opponents in an ideological basis, the only alternative is to denounce them as spawn of the devil. And then people wonder why so few of those vaunted half a million members actually ever want to turn up to a branch meeting? Who can blame them?
Final thoughts
There are two things that are not mentioned in the above reflections — Brexit and the upcoming Labour party leadership election. Hopefully it should be fairly clear why the fundamental issues around counterpower and ideology will remain problems, regardless of who wins the party leadership role. The lack of any discussion of Brexit, especially given the clamour from the continuity-Corbyn camp that this was the main cause of the December disaster, may seem perverse at first sight. But the Brexit debate is now over, so if that was the only barrier standing in the way of an electoral victory for a left-of-centre Labour party, then all problems have been resolved and there is nothing to do, other than suffer the next 5 years of purgatory secure in the faith and hope of the resurrection the next time around. For the less complacent, discussions around where to focus energy and activity in the meantime should probably start sooner than later. As a final disclaimer, this author is in the wrong country and wrong political tendency (that’s not my washing up bowl, thanks) to take any part in that discussion and this text is not intended as an “intervention” in it in any way. Simply put, these notes are for those friends and old comrades who have entered into the Labour party and are interested in different perspectives on the current situation. Not to mention the desire to answer the question about the supposed death of the materialist basis of politics.